President Trump would be constrained by the Senate and House of Representatives.

The race for the US presidency is now coming into its final furlong and, against odds which would have seemed impossible even six months ago, Donald Trump is within a whisker of entering the Oval Office. It is therefore incumbent upon on us to ask what sort of presidency we would be looking at were this to happen.

First, let us be clear about one thing: this admittedly bizarre man is a man gifted with huge abilities. Yes, he is a showman of the most extraordinary kind; a loudmouth, many would argue, yet also thin skinned. He is capable of cruel invective and even crueller put-downs. He also espouses policies – his great wall and ban on Muslims – which would be sudden death to any conventional politician. But then again he isn’t a conventional politician. He is a businessman and a very successful one at that. He says things that are thought by many but are unsayable by the Washington elite. And it is that Washington elite that most fears his arrival in the White House.

“I’m going to drain the swamp,” is Trump’s colourful yet terrifying promise. In classical terms, that’s a vow to ‘clean the Augean Stables’, the definition of which is to ‘clear away corruption’ or to ‘perform a large and unpleasant task that has long called for attention’. Hercules is the one said to have carried it out so perhaps that’s where we get the term ‘the labours of Hercules’.

Anyway, Trump says that the little man is trodden underfoot and his interests are completely subordinated to those of the ruling classes. By these he means the politicians, the bankers, the captains of industry and, indeed, all the country’s decision makers – be they in the law, the military, the town or county halls, academia or even the church. There is, he says, a vast gang-up by all those he considers view themselves as superior, a cut above the common herd. We may have arrived, he argues, after centuries of struggle at a one person, one vote system of government in a system where the movers and shakers have contrived to make it seem otherwise.

Once upon a time, the people who put themselves forward for public office were high minded – or at least seemed so – and were driven by factors other than those of enriching themselves. More often than not they were worldly people, middle-aged and sometimes old who had already proved themselves in their chosen field and were esteemed by their peers. Among their successors, however, venality reigns supreme and you have the spectacle of presidents and prime ministers – Tony Blair is a case in point – using the prestige of their former office to tout for business among the world’s most unedifying rulers and all to join the ranks of the mega-rich themselves.

It is a moment of high irony that the dragon which threatens to slay this cabal of self-servers is as rich as Croesus himself. Yet he has never viewed himself as part of the mega-rich’s charmed circle and they, despite his riches, would never have admitted him to it. His brash vulgarity, no-holds-barred rhetoric and giant ego did not lend itself to their view of the world. That view might be one that tolerated all manner of low-life activities – business or otherwise – but they had to be masked in a veneer of respectability and kept from the public view. It was many of Trump’s sentiments which drove our own recent Brexit campaign.

So what are we to make of a looming Trump presidency? Should we fear this devil-may-care outsider, who threatens to hit the establishment like a tsunami? I think not. There are so many checks and balances in the world’s greatest democracy that, were he to run amok – which he has not done in business – he could be contained. And there is just a chance that he could succeed and ‘make America great again’. (Actually, in my view it has never ceased to be great.) In spectacular fashion with this latest Hillary FBI expose, a 10-point Clinton lead has narrowed in two days to one point.

This crazy election of two incredibly flawed candidates is now Trump’s to lose. If he stays on message for one week, avoids scandals of his own and puts a zip on his mouth he might just do it.